Episode 117: Uncovering Your Upturn

Hey pals. I've been a bit delinquent in just getting back into the G town studio grind and sitting down behind the mic, but it felt great to do that today. I appreciate that you're always here listening and being rad and righteous human beings. I talked about my mental state and the importance of going analog, getting offline and connecting with yourself. I love you. May you make the most of yer Monday.

My new album "Geographics" is out now on all platforms. You can preorder the digital, cd and vinyl versions of the album on my bandcamp page, (which helps me greatly) but I understand that cash is tight all over the map, so you can also order a five dollar Geographics sticker. 5 beans! This album is really special to me (as my friends Melissa Payne and Charles Austin played all over it) and I hope you'll come along for the supersonic ride. Follow me @gravencanada on all the socials, and check my website to see when I'm playing live in a town near you. Join Graventown today to support yours truly for only 8 clams a month. 

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:22

Well, hello friends, we're back at it again in Graventown. There's a short one for you today. How are you all doing? It is Monday. It's a beautifully sunny, content temperature day. It's like around 18 or 19 degrees Celsius. Not sure the Fahrenheit conversion for my American friends, but um that's gotta be good. It's gotta be somewhere around 70 or getting close to 80 or something. Listen, I um appreciate you being here. I haven't been on the mic for a regular podcast for a while, and I'm not totally sure why. I've sort of been a little bit evasive, a little bit uh convective. Everything is sort of brewing in my oven before it comes out. That makes it seem like I'm just taking a huge, gigantic shit, but really, that's not what I'm doing. I just uh I laugh at things sometimes. Anyway, certain analogies, you know, turns of phrase they take you down dark roads. I appreciate you being here. It's nice to be back in the Graven Town saddle, sitting here with y'all on the mic. I've had some really cool um guests lately on the pod, and I I, you know, considered lately, even back to a couple of months ago where Strombo was on. Not sure if you heard that episode. That was episode 100. Definitely the most downloaded by far to this date. So, yeah, I um I'm very thankful for that. I've had a bunch of cool musicians over the years. I am hoping to have a very cool uh musician by the name of Jen, whose music is under the name Broken Down Golf Cart, who I've been following for a while. And she's actually from Ottawa, but she now lives in the UK, and uh just continues to pump out music, like just has this really high output of really creative songs that have such great sonic structures to them. I'm always drawn in, and uh yeah, broken down golf cart, that's the band. So check out Jen and what she does online. And uh, I recently got to interview director Natalie Bolt. Um, she put on a movie called Holy Days, and we had such a great chat, like we really just kind of vibed, and uh yeah, she's South African, now lives in Vancouver, and this movie Holy Days is making the rounds. It's really cool, man. I really highly recommend it. I'm not being paid anything to say that, I just really appreciate good art and good cinema, and um it's a great story about three nuns and this little boy who lives in the community and uh has lost his mom, and there's just so much to it, and it's just this real tale, you know, of travel, and there's a journey aspect to it, and it's just really beautiful. Um I mean you know, physical and spiritual journey, it's a great story. So go go see it, go see holy days if you can, and check out my convo with Nat Bolt. And hey, it goes without saying, if you want to support me, I would really appreciate that. As uh I often feel like the little engine that could, and somehow I can, and I still am right now, but you know, there's there's dark days, and I try to keep everything pretty reasonable for people. Uh if you want to support me and be a part of Graven Town, I have something called a Ko-Fi, which is like a Patreon, except Ko-Fi is much more fair with the share that they um give to the artists. And it's basically it's a payment system, nothing much happens on the Ko-Fi platform, but I'm finding more ways to interact, connect with people. There's an email list and I send out updates, and uh yeah, there's a bunch of people in there. It's only eight bucks a month. And if you go to ko-fi.com slash graven canada, you can be a part of that. Would really appreciate you. But yeah, it's nice to be back just sitting in my basement. And I I was sitting out front earlier this morning. I'm not sure if you have a front wherever you live. I'm sure everyone has a front, whether it's a front stoop or a front porch or just a little tiny piece of grass out front of your apartment or whatever. Not a lot of people have a backyard. I'm very privileged to have a backyard, and I don't sit out there much. I'm not sure why. I have concerts out there, but I don't sit in the backyard. But I sit in the front and kind of survey, and um it was feeling good, you know, with the weather. I think that's a huge upturn factor for me with my mood. It helps me to feel like there's just more ease, you know, there's more room between the breaths, there's more room to kind of just collect your thoughts, start your projects, go down the roads you're going down. And I've been getting booked for some more things too recently, and I think that's always great. You know, but it's sort of like the music world is very interesting in the sense that you think it works on the schedule of many, many months out for booking, and that that happens, but sometimes there are cancellations, sometimes people running festivals or doing things are struggling and they have a lot of volunteers, they got a high volume of applications, but they aren't always able to sift through. And so I do have understanding for all that. And so recently, yeah, a few little things have come up, been added to a few more things that I'll announce. But yeah, you can always see what I'm doing at graven.ca. Um, I yeah, I am just um rolling along. That that reminds me, I gotta get in touch with Russ. I haven't heard from him for a bit. Russ is a guy who helps me with some booking, and he just helps me with different things that are happening uh with me. And at any rate, I um, yeah, the upturn I think has slowly started to arrive. And I I'm I'm okay. I'm here, I'm here for it. I'm writing it out. I'm just feeling more okay with everything. You know, I even had uh speaking in my last um pod, I think well, two ago, was called drama uh drama, drama dodger. Drama dodger? Drama. Drama Dodger. It's funny how you get two D words together sometimes, and you're like, wait, what's the pronunciation of that? Though you've said it your whole life. Drama Dodger. And I'm trying to dodge that stuff, trying to stay away from any type of weird relationship shippy stuff that happens with um with people, with friends, where it just feels like there's this uneven push-pull thing happening. And uh yeah, recently another friend who will remain nameless is also just gone, you know, uh, for the foreseeable future. And I won't get into the details, and it's always sort of weird when that happens, but luckily, I think I alluded to this in that podcast. But as you get older, you get more used to that. And it's something called pattern recognition. As we grow older, we can see patterns emerging. And if I look back and look at the timeline of the friendship with this person, there's a lot of sort of blurry points, there's a lot of stormy moments that you're sort of like unsure as to why that's stormy. I'm not sure of you're, you know, it's like you can't really find the context, you're at sea in the friendship, and um that's how it felt. And so, you know, I think sometimes you just have to see those things as a gift. You have to go, okay, you know, it wasn't meant to be, and it's okay, and you can wish them well on their journeys in life, as I do for this person. But yeah, it's uh it's funny, and um yeah, I I'm not I don't need to get into it, other than it's just interesting that another situation like that happened uh recently. And I think it's also I'm connected to a lot of people, you know. Being a musician, we have a lot of sort of ancillary satellite type friends who aren't really, really super close, but they're people who we orbit around. You know, we we just see them at events, we run into them, whether they live in your city or your town, but you don't really know who your friends are until you experience some tipping points within that friendship, you know, because a true friend, I believe anyway, when drama is something that is going to happen, you know, I I said I like to dodge it as much as I can, but it's we're human beings, it's something that is just born into us. People are going through hard times sometimes, and they they want to create it to help them feel better about their situations. And but when it arises, when things happen, when there's an argument, when things kind of go sideways, I think a true friend is someone who goes, Hey, like, can we talk about this? Uh, as opposed to bye-bye. Now, to clarify, if it's something intuitively that you're sensing when that moment happens, like if there's some real like abuse of weird tones or something coming out in their language that you're just not into, the bye-bye, that's fine. I just think that a a true friend is someone your your real friends, both of you, not just one, will say, Hey, that felt really weird. You know, what happened? Can we can we talk about this? Can we go for coffee? We go for a walk and hash this out a bit. Um, because a true friend wants to, you know, be there with you. They want to be there with you through the ups and downs, they want to connect, they want to be in your life. They don't just want to flee at the first sign of chaos or struggle. They go, Oh, I'm I'm I'm with you. It's cool, it's alright. And uh those friends are are harder to find as you get older. I have some that I'm very thankful for, and that's really cool. But yeah, as we go down this road, it gets a little more thin in terms of your true friends. You know, there are always great people around you supporting you, and I'm I'm lucky to play music where I have, you know, sometimes these great friends and they don't live necessarily close to me, but that's the great thing. I think one of the great ancillary benefits of music is that it really connects you with the people that you're meant to connect with. You meet these people who hear your songs and they kind of understand you. And I I love the fact that you know I can travel to different towns and and play shows, and you know, if I make a new friend, that is beautiful to me. That's always something that like puts this little rainbow puff into the ether sphere, makes you feel like, okay, yeah, you know, this is great. And and you know, to find someone like-minded, you know, they and they maybe get your humor and you get theirs, and you have this shared understanding. It's it's a beautiful thing because relationships come and go, and they're tricky. They've always been tricky for me. I mean, I I've I've been, you know, in long-termers for 15 years of my life, and so I know what that's like uh approaching 50. But friendships really are the steadying factors in your life. They're the like the main characters that drive the plot of the story, because they're the ones that are, you know, hopefully going to be there. There's not really, you don't break up the same way you do with a friend. I mean, that that can happen too, but it's not the same. You know, with romance and everything else and all of the stuff and the the codependency that can happen so easily, it it all gets very tricky. It's like tight rope walking. At least, at least I've found. I I haven't really found um a relationship situation that is like feels connected, you know, like a good friendship does. And that that's what I'm looking for, I guess, in life. I would say if I'm open to anything, I would be open to being with someone that feels like a friend, you know, someone that I can connect with and chat with, and and you know, we can laugh, and there's no pressure to be another person, you know, to be another thing, or to like fit in to the mold of their lives. It's just like you are you, and that's a beautiful thing, and keep doing that. Anyways, I digress. It's a lovely Monday that the sun is just beaming in to the Graventown basement here. And uh, yeah, I do also have some cool things coming up in the backyard. Um on June 6th, Ron Hawkins of Lowest of the Low and the Do Good Assassins and just Ron Hawkins himself. He's a such a troubadour, award-winning, amazing mensch of a human being. Uh, I love Ron. And um yeah, he's gonna be in my yard on Saturday, June the 6th. And then after that, in the Graven Town uh Summer Series, I can't remember what I call it. Oh, Yard Pals. In the Graventown Yard Pal series, show number two is happening July 18th, and that will be drum roll Sky Wallace. Sky Wallace is a great singer-songwriter from Toronto. Um Sky is a force to be reckoned with on all levels, just communicatively, song-wise, musically, really just a true force. Um, Sky's a new mom, too, and just posts about the truth of having a baby and trying to, you know, make music and all of that insanity. And it's it's so cool to that she's very honest with her journey and everything that's happening. So I'm looking forward to that show. And then later in the summer, I think it's might be actually early September. I haven't nailed down the date just yet, but I'm I will get it for you. That will be Melissa Payne, who is working on some new music and is trying to get into the the mold of you know doing some new things where she's getting out there and um promoting her new uh music and just playing solo, playing her songs, yada yada. You get what I'm saying? Because a lot of the times Melissa is a support musician and plays beautifully and amazingly with whoever she plays with, but she also is an incredible songwriter. So stoked for that. And then capping all the whole series off, I think in early October will be Stephen Stanley Omley. That will be fun. Steven and I have a really special friendship, and we get along really well. I have a special friendship with Melissa too, and Ron. Sky, I don't know as well, but um, I uh we do vibe very well, and we have a lot of the same friends. And but but Steven is someone who we have a very scarily, eerily similar sense of humor, and we can just laugh on end about the silliest shit and text each other and just enjoy it. And his songs are really like books. I love it, you know. You you get into one of his songs, it's like you're cracking open catcher in the rye. It's like you're going somewhere, you're going on a journey. There's plot lines, there's characters, there's so much going on, and I I love that about his songwriting. He's like a bookmaker, it's a beautiful thing. So Steven will be in my yard. Man, my voice keeps cracking. So I'm looking forward to all those. My uh my voice is sort of cracking today. I'm not sure what's going on, but I thought I would read you a little excerpt from the teaching of Buddha. Here we go. And this is from a section called The Buddha's Land. As has been explained, if a brotherhood does not forget its duty of spreading Buddhist teaching and of living in harmony, it will steadily grow larger, and its teaching will spread more widely. That means that more and more people will be seeking enlightenment, and it also means that the evil armies of greed, anger, and foolishness, which are led by the devil of ignorance and lust, will begin to retreat, and that wisdom, light, faith, and joy will dominate. Let's read that again. Beautiful. As has been explained, if a brotherhood does not forget its duty of spreading Buddhist teaching and of living in harmony, harmony, it will steadily grow larger and its teaching will spread more widely. Beautiful. This means that more and more people will be seeking enlightenment, and it also means that the evil armies of greed, anger, and foolishness, which are led by the devil of ignorance and lust, will begin to retreat. Page turn. And that wisdom, light, faith, and joy will dominate. Oh man, don't we need to hear that? I think we need to hear that right now with everything happening everywhere in the world. And uh actually, Sky Wallace had a great post about this recently. It's like there is a need for art with everything else going on, with the AI shit, with the algorithms being dominated by monopolies and corporations, there's a need. There's a feeling, there's a vibe that people are hungry for it. They really want to experience and get immersed in art, and that's a beautiful thing. And it can't be taken away, it can't be commodified, it can't be AI'd because as everyone knows, true art has to come from human experience, it's got to come from a place of suffering, sorrow, true deep joy in the depths of your being. You know, you sort of feel it in the bottom of your ribs, that type of joy. No robot can figure that out. They can understand the definitions, maybe that other people have written about and try to extract that, but it can't be boiled down, you know. It's not always so easy, it's not always so definable. We live in a real chat GPT world where everyone wants to synthesize everything, everyone wants to figure out what it is, what it means, and get it down, you know, these three paragraphs that someone wrote that make so much sense. I'm just using a random idea, but someone wrote this, say these great three paragraphs for their work. And then they're like, nah, it should be one paragraph. I'm gonna go to Chat GPT. I mean, it's like everyone, you know, there used to be people in the world who worked specifically in marketing, and they deal with that sort of shit because it's like you gotta be quick, you gotta get your ad out there, say what you need to say and get up. But art doesn't need to be that way. Art can be long form, you know, podcasting is a huge enterprise. People love listening to long-form conversations because it doesn't have to be so yadda-da-da-da-da. Like, and and that's what we live in. You know, we live in a drive-through, I want it now, chat GPT world. No one has patience. Our patience as a human species is gone, and we need to find it again. We need to be able to be standing in line. And I say this to someone, I I struggle with it too, because everything is so immediate. So when you go somewhere, you know, even at like a local coffee shop, and there's three or four people in front of you, and then one person is having a hard time deciding what they want. Now, granted, that can be annoying, and I I've I've been there, I'll I'll feel that with you, but it's okay. You know, you're you're gonna survive, buddy. You're gonna get your coffee. It might take another three minutes on top of the 10 seconds you apportioned in your mind, but it's gonna happen. And and uh we need to make space for that voice, just telling. Us it's fucking okay, man. It's okay to not be first in line. It's okay to not get something immediately. It's okay to wait. That's how you grow as a human, you know? And um I feel that you know that that um line from the Buddha, people are wanting joy, you know, people are wanting to connect. And that's going to be the flip side. You know, I I really, really hope. I had this thought recently, but I think, in my predictions and I conversations I've had with friends, that there's going to be kind of a revolt against social media, against smartphones, against those things by kids who are my daughter's age and maybe a bit older. You know, that generation is just going to get to a point where they realize these things are sickening us. They're literally rotting our brains from the inside out. And I think that there's going to be a retreat back to like, you know, old school snail mail. There's going to be a retreat back to writing people letters. There's going to be, you know, a retreat to, okay, guys, we're going on this uh fishing trip or camping or whatever, but no phones, and you can only bring uh pens and paper and books, and like maybe an old school camera or something. I think that that type of shit is something we're gonna start seeing, and I'm here for it. If I could leave social media tomorrow, I would, man. I would. There are moments where I have fun with it, and I do love the fact that I connect with people, and that's really fun. But I think we're in a day and age. I was talking to Sloane's mom about this yesterday. We know too much information. Human beings were never designed to know as much as we do about everything. We're we're you're expected to be geniuses on all these different topics. It's insane. It's insane. We did we didn't have the access that we have to everything now at our fingertips. You know, you can just be like, oh, you know, in the in when I was a kid growing up, if I wanted to find out what happened in the Civil War, I'd have to read a book to find out. And now I, you know, pull up my phone in two seconds, you know. But I before getting the book, I have to walk to a place, go in the doors, find that book in the library, and look it up. You know, people had encyclopedias in their homes. That was like a normal thing, these huge volumes of books with information about the world and wars and different geographies and topographies. And now that is so readily available all the time. Like I can pull up my phone and be like, what happened in the Civil War? And you know, Google will give me a two-paragraph synthesis, um, and then other, you know, reading. It's just there's too much stuff at our fingertips. And I think that happens a lot now with causes too, and protests and everything else, which are great. People should feel the need to do that, but it's like people are going insane. You know, you you see the level of mentally unwell people rising up like tides all around. Because it's just like our brains are overloaded with fucking info. So I think with the upturn that I've been feeling, I'm okay distancing. I'm okay being like, I need to leave this shit more. Um, the social media, the phones, all that stuff, you know, just mindlessly watching videos, scrolling, YouTube. I do it. We all do it. And we're like, fuck, where did that whole hour and a half go? Like, what the fuck was I doing? And uh, you know, being more intentional with your time. I have a whiteboard in my room with markers. I have to like physically write on it things that I have upcoming, and that is really helpful. So I would recommend that to any of uh any of you out there trying to get a game plan going to change your vibe, to find your upturn. And uh yeah, long live analog, long live digital well, you know, compact discs. By the way, I have some of those coming in May. They're a little delayed with my distributor, but uh, they are coming. So thank you to those who bought them, and thank you to so many people who've bought the vinyl of my new album, Geographics. You can download the digital to this coming Friday is Bandcamp Friday, May 1st. I could really, really, really use your support. Even if you know a few hundred people bought a sticker, that would be amazing. Um, stickers are five bucks or whatever you want to pay, and I'll ship them to you, I'll write them, I'll write you a note. Um, yeah, just appreciate your support. Go listen to Geographics, that's my new album. I'm gonna be promoting that for a long time now. So thank you uh for listening. Thanks for being here. Please go find your upturn, go analog, get in the woods, bring an old fucking tape recorder with batteries, and uh yeah, record some music, hang out with friends, tell jokes, you know, write things that are coming from your brain, from your experience onto paper. People want that shit. It's important. I love you. You're always welcome in Graven Town. Find your upturn. I'll be here with you. Much love, Palace.